Anna Wickham (1883–1947), a British poet whose work often examines the constraints and emotional power of women’s domestic lives, wrote “The Wife’s Song, II” as a direct address from a wife to her “Dear.” Wickham married in 1906 and spent much of her life negotiating between her writing and the demands of marriage and motherhood; her poems repeatedly turn small, intimate moments into spaces of hidden authority. Written in the early twentieth century, when women’s emotional work within marriage was rarely treated as serious poetic material, this poem makes a surprising argument: sorrow is not a failure of love, but its best and most serious gift.
The opening claim is deliberately startling: “Two gifts I gave you, Love and Sorrow, / Of which the last is best.” To rank sorrow above love reverses ordinary expectations, yet the rest of the poem explains the logic. Sorrow has brought the listener to tears, and those tears become a form of strength: “What victory shall your world deny you, / Now you have wept?” The private act of weeping is imagined as a conquest over the outside world. Once that release has happened, the speaker can promise comfort: “All peace of love I will restore you / When you have slept.” The central idea, then, is that love and sorrow are not opposites. Within an intimate bond, sorrow can deepen a person, and the one who receives it can be restored to peace rather than broken by it.
The poem’s shape supports this tenderness. It is built in two short quatrains that alternate longer and shorter lines, a pattern close to ballad meter, giving the words a lulling, almost cradle-like rhythm. The first stanza rhymes “best” with “rest,” and the second rhymes “wept” with “slept,” so the sound of the poem itself moves from giving to rest, from weeping to sleep. The repeated word “you” at the ends of the second stanza’s odd-numbered lines keeps the address focused on the listener, while the question “Now you have wept?” hangs briefly in the middle of the stanza, as if letting the tears settle before the promise of peace arrives.
Wickham’s word choices make abstract emotions feel physical and transactional. The word “gifts” frames love and sorrow as things the wife can offer, and the phrase “’Twas bitter giving” gives sorrow a taste, acknowledging that the act cost her something. The capitalized “Love” and “Sorrow” turn them into almost ceremonial presences, while “Come here to me and rest” is so plain and close that it sounds like the voice of a lullaby. The word “victory” brings in an echo of battles and public achievement, only to place true victory in the private act of weeping. By the final line, “peace” and “slept” close the poem on a note of quiet repair.
What makes “The Wife’s Song, II” significant is the authority it grants to the wife’s voice. In Wickham’s time, a wife was often expected to soothe and support, yet she was rarely seen as the one who gives meaning to grief. Here the speaker does both: she has given sorrow as deliberately as she has given love, and she promises restoration as if it is her own power. The poem matters because it treats domestic consolation as insight. Sorrow, in Wickham’s song, is not the opposite of love; it is one of love’s most serious gifts.